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Manion, Jen

Liberty’s Prisoners: Carceral Culture in Early America

Penn (Philadelphia)

2015



OUR SYNOPSIS: Jen Manion explores how a new penal system sought to reform and regulate society in Philadelphia from the end of the American Revolution to 1835. The white male propertied population used punishment to establish a hierarchical moral order of citizenship with themselves at the top, marginalizing people of color, women, and the working class. Manion focuses on Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia, the city deemed “the birthplace of the penitentiary.” (11) They show prison labor was used for reform, profit, and regulation of the sexual division of labor. Meanwhile, poverty was stigmatized and the economic ordering of society was based on patriarchy and white supremacy. Manion convincingly demonstrates the centrality of punishment in American democratic society.

BIG QUESTIONS:

  • How do economic fluctuations relate to fluctuations in incarceration?

  • What roles did women play in the carceral state of the Early Republic?

FEATURE QUOTES:

  • “When economic depression struck and crime rates spike, the underclasses seemed more threatening than ever before. Elites did not stand idly by but rather invoked the authority of enlightened justice to assert hierarchy and order. They used punishment to classify and segregate people along lines of difference—crime, class, gender, race, and age—in order to identify those who might one day stand as citizens if properly reformed.” (2)

  • “The expansion of punishment was not a cold, calculated gesture of distant hands but rather a messy, intimate, and contested process that unfolded over time. Reformers, judges, Inspectors, and lawyers enjoyed the highly charged and emotional meetings they had with society’s most vulnerable women, as it enabled them to recalibrate the tension and reach of patriarchal authority into something more elastic and broadly shared—appropriate for democracy.” (3)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:

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